Lessons in parenting from Atticus Finch

Reading articles and blogposts on To Kill a Mockingbird, the beloved, enduring classic of American literature that is celebrating a half century of publication this year, it strikes me how the book — in a very narrow view — could be considered a perfect manual for parenting.

A lot of things happen in the novel over a year’s time in the small southern American town in which it is set. Harper Lee’s craft is visible in the way all these events come together and create a smooth whole, and in the characters she breathes life into — among them that of Atticus Finch, father to Jem and Scout, two children at the novel’s heart.

Atticus isn’t really much of a hands-on parent — he is a single dad with a busy career as a lawyer, and the chores of parenting in the Finch household are performed by the children’s nanny, Calpurnia.

Yet, he talks to them as equals — even if Scout is sitting on his knee — and he does the best job possible of taking care of his children’s souls and giving them a moral compass.

He tells them, quoting a lesson handed down to him by his father, that they can shoot all the blue jays they want — if they can get ’em — but it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy.”

Atticus’s advice ranges from the deeply philosophical — “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” to the immensely practical — “Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.”

After he has shot a rabid dog down, Atticus realises his adolescent son is in some danger of idolising the kind of courage a gun gives its holder.

His way of countering this is to ask Jem to spend his afternoons reading to a dying neighbour who is in pain but refuses to accept morphine to alleviate it.

After she dies, he tells Jem: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs Dubose won… According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”

One of my favourites is a small lesson that I have always subscribed to, though I realise only now, as I revisit To Kill A Mockingbird, that it is probably something I imbibed from Atticus.

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake,” he says in the book. “But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.”

At the novel’s moral core is Atticus’s belief that “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

He extends this understanding even to the people violently opposed to him, his sense of justice and fairness always unwavering.

I believe this is as relevant to us today as it was to Jem and Scout living in a deeply racist society.

In today’s multi-ethnic world, in a city like Bangalore where you rub shoulders with people from a hundred different cultural backgrounds, what better way could there be to teach our children a lesson in inclusiveness than to tell them that they need to climb into people’s skins and walk around in them to truly understand them?